A Review of Bean: a Mac Friendly Word Processor

Bean. What do you think of when the word bean comes up? Usually what comes to mind is not a friendly word processor for Intel Macintoshes. Most Mac users will either write with Textedit and its limited features, or put up with MS Word and its abusively long load time. Time for a change.

What is Bean? It is a word processor that is built for Intel Macs, designed with the frequent writer in mind.

What makes Bean a good choice over Textedit? Unlike Textedit, its interface is much like MS Word’s, and therefor easy to make a document that is exceptional every time. It also has a word counter that is visible just at the bottom of the document, so an extra addition program is not needed to get a word count.

MS Word and Bean, the highs and lows. If you’ve ever used a MS Word program, you know about the monstrous load waiting time. Bean is ready to use immediately and has a wonderful writing environment as well. But, Bean does not do footnotes and floating graphics, which MS Word can do. So, for simple, quick, and beautiful writing, Bean is the best choice. For footnotes or advanced graphic settings in your document, MS Word is still in the lead.

Worried that the project you’ve been working on won’t be read by Bean? Bean can read and write the most common file formats, and can import and export MS Word documents easily. So anything that you’ve written on another word processor, Bean can open and edit it without a problem.

What does Bean cost? Well, simply nothing, that’s right, its free! It’s a Gnu GPL release, which means that it is free for the public to download and use. Compared to MS Word, which can run 80-100$ and up in price, its quite the bargain.

So, in review of the review, Bean is a great, free word processor that is available for anyone to use, and is a treat to write with. While it doesn’t have everything, it does manage to make a smile come to your face when it opens immediately like a joyful songbird, instead of a sleepy bear…

Download Bean for OS X, and the [Objective-C] open source code from www.bean-osx.com.